Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex and Politics in New Zealand Helen Smyth Steele Roberts, $29.95, ISBN 1877228168 Women will recognise the subtext of Helen Smyth’s history as a record of their own families; not the families posing stiffly in…
Burnt Barley Peta Mathias Vintage, $29.95, ISBN 1869414276 Irish at Heart Marie Gray HarperCollins, $24.95, ISBN 1865903449 It’s bound to continue to be one of the curiosities of this century – as it was of the last – that however…
Interview Harry Ricketts (HR): Did books mean a lot to you as a child? Kate De Goldi (K De G): They were my whole life really. I was a remarkably sedentary child. My mother’s favourite description of me was…
Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 eds Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond, Michele Leggott Auckland University Press, $49.95, ISBN 869402308 A thick black-and-white book with a beautiful cover illustration by Patrick Hanly taken from the second issue of Freed, Big Smoke…
Nineteen Widows Under Ash Damien Wilkins Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 086473395X Wilkins’ new novel, set in the United States, begins as Evelyn Herbert undertakes a road journey to her Pacific Northwest hometown. She has left her husband, and…
Mene Confessions: Tall Tales from Netball’s Inner Circle Bernice Mene (and Geoff Young) Hodder Moa Beckett, $24.95, ISBN 1869588282 Picture the scene: an exceptionally glum group of public servants in Wellington one Monday morning in October 1999. The reason…